Goodbye, Gloria

The Second World War erupted when the author was a child and, like hundreds of other boys and girls, she was snatched out of the world she knew and thrown in at the deep end, to sink or swim, in another one. A world of stone cottages, iron ranges, strange local accents and weird food, not to mention homes without electricity, hot running water and indoor lavatories.

The author had to learn to live with a new family and to understand their ways and how they expected her to behave. Also, she had to suffer the indignity of being, for her own family, almost “out of sight, out of mind”.

After two years, she was sent to London to live and was obliged to “learn” yet another family and yet another way of life. She experienced air raids and the sudden horror of V.1 rockets, then, with the advent of the V.2s, she found herself back in Derbyshire, where things had changed as much as she had herself.

Nostalgically, the author revives memories of wartime songs and radio programmes and the end of the story finds her in the midst of the victory celebrations in the heart of London on the very last day of the war.